Prabhakaran: Key to the LTTE
Sabil Francis
Research Scholar, JNU
November 26, 1999. Velupillai Prabhakaran becomes 45 years old today – a day that the LTTE commemorates as “Great Heroes Day”. It will remember the 50,000 martyrs who have died for Tamil Eelam and Prabhakaran will speak to the Tamil people through radio. In the past, even as he spoke, the LTTE has unleashed violence – its way of remembering the war dead. And as the island nation of
Sri Lanka
moves towards elections, Prabhakaran is the key issue. Will he sue for peace or will he continue the war? His control over the world’s most powerful guerrilla organisation is absolute. Prabhakaran is the LTTE and the LTTE is Prabhakaran.
Unlike other guerrilla groups in the LTTE loyalty to the leader is paramount. All LTTE cadres take an oath of personal loyalty to Prabhakaran, and go into battle. He alone can make or break the peace in
Sri Lanka
, and remains the greatest obstacle to peace in the island. Paranoid about even his own followers, and fanatically committed to the idea of a free Tamil homeland, there is little chance of his compromising the goal of a Tamil Eelam. And since Prabhakaran wields unchallenged power within the LTTE, the war in the island will continue no matter who comes to power in the December elections. This is why the promises of both Kumaratunge and Wickramasinghe to end the war sound hollow. They face a fanatic opponent who controls the organisation with an iron hand.
There has been a radical shift in the ideology and tactics of the LTTE after the ascendancy of Prabhakaran, who reached the top after a power tussle in the 1980s. The LTTE then saw the struggle as one against the Sri Lankan LTTE and not against the Sinhalese people. After 1982, reflecting the ascendancy of Prabhakaran in the organisation, the stress on Tamil nationalism increased. This scope for any compromise within the framework of a united
Sri Lanka
shrank. And leaders like Uma Maheshwaran who were Marxist internationalists rather than Tamil nationalists were hounded out of the organisation. Prabhakaran made his stand on the question of Tamil Eelam clear in a 1986 interview to India Today: “We have crossed the stage of being able to visualise a solution within the framework of a united
Sri Lanka
. We have come to a point of no return with regard to the Eelam goal.” Thus, there is no scope for even negotiations.
In the LTTE, all decisions that count are made by Prabhakaran alone. Though the LTTE started off as a typical Marxist organisation with considerable devolution of power, the Central organisation was dissolved soon after the Prabhakaran-Maheshwaran split. The emphasis now is on extreme loyalty to the leader and the centralisation of all decision making powers in the hands of Prabhakaran. In fact, though all Tigers, irrespective of rank, enjoy the same privileges, the area commanders are allowed to take decisions only at the tactical level and not in formulation of policy. Prabhakaran cannot stand defeat, or any challenge to his supremacy.
Early associates of Prabhakaran recall how he hated losing even friendly physical contests and how, if he sensed that he was losing, he would turn vicious and bite his opponent. Later, in the 1980s, Prabhakaran persuaded the Central Committee of the LTTE to expel its chairman Uma Maheshwaran on the charge of making love to one of the group’s female members. Gopalswamy Mahattya, another founding member, was thrown into prison by Prabhakaran on charges of having spied for
India
. No one has challenged Prabhakaran and lived to tell the tale. Having successfully eliminated the entire second rung of the LTTE, Prabhakaran's word remains unchallenged.
This is why the LTTE has not accepted proposals that have given concessions to the Tamils – for example, the devolution package of Chandrika Kumaratunge. Prabhakaran does not want to be the Chief Minister of a Tamil state in a federal
Sri Lanka
– he wants to be the President of an independent Tamil Eelam. To a man who once looked in the mirror in
Madras
and said, “I am history”, nothing less that the chance to make it will be enough. And that is the tragedy of
Sri Lanka
.
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